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The following is an email I — and 20 million others with malfunctioning spam filters — received a few months before the 2008 presidential election. It opens with Aesop’s “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” a nice little tale encouraging us to be responsible individuals.

The fable is then appropriated by someone wallowing in self-righteousness and privilege, and turned into a modern, near-clever parable for the “Brotherhood of Me” crowd, complete with not-too-thinly-veiled racism, cloddish ideology, and the rightwing certainty that “other people” are perpetually trying to take advantage of “we good, decent folk.”

Fortunately, all the intended recipients’ email addresses were in plain view. I took this as an invitation to “edit” the story for them — and hit “send to all.”

AESOP’S VERSION

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed.

The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Be responsible for yourself!

_________________

WHITE, FAT AND SASSY’S VERSION

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving.

CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast.

How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and everybody cries when they sing, ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green.’

Jesse Jackson stages a demonstration in front of the ant’s house where the news stations film the group singing, ‘We shall overcome.’ Jesse then has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper’s sake.

Nancy Pelosi & John Kerry exclaim in an interview with Larry King that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and both call for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share.

Finally, the EEOC drafts the Economic Equity & Anti-Grasshopper Act retroactive to the beginning of the summer.

The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the government.

Hillary gets her old law firm to represent the grasshopper in a defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried before a panel of federal judges that Bill Clinton appointed from a list of single-parent welfare recipients.

The ant loses the case.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant’s food while the government house he is in, which just happens to be the ant’s old house, crumbles around him because he doesn’t maintain it.

The ant has disappeared in the snow.

The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the once peaceful neighborhood.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Be careful how you vote.

_____________________

Then…it was my turn:

THE ANT AND THE GRASSHOPPER

(An Aesop-Buchanan Collaboration)

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper takes a job at Walmart.

Come winter, the ant finds he has more supplies than he and his family need so he invests the surplus in a small business. Due to hard work and good business sense, the ant’s company grows into a profitable enterprise.

The grasshopper continues to turn in ten hours a day at Walmart, where in lieu of benefits and a fair wage, management gives him tips on how to apply for food stamps.

(Although the grasshopper never expected to earn as much money as the successful, business-owning ant, he did think that full-time work should earn a living wage — silly grasshopper)

After years of fair dealing, the ant is finding it so difficult to compete with large corporations and their globalized cheap labor that he is forced to sell the company and retire. His employees throw a big party for him in appreciation of his years of fairness, honesty and friendship.

The large corporation that now owns the ant’s company immediately fires all the ant’s employees and
outsources their jobs to India.

The ant’s former employees join the grasshopper at Walmart.

With the added profit from outsourcing the ant’s
company, the mega-corporation purchases even more politicians who promise to work hard against peace, unions, the environment, anti-trust legislation, poor people, the middle class and anything else that might inhibit the bottom line.

Risking their non-union jobs at Walmart, the grasshopper and the ant’s former employees demand that they be paid for overtime, but are told they are exempt because Walmart considers them to be ‘managers.’ The case makes it to the Supreme Court, where Reagan and Bush appointees rule in favor of Walmart, admonishing the plaintiffs to ‘go home and feel lucky to even have jobs, what with all the outsourcing going on these days.’

The mega-corporation also buys CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, radio stations and news periodicals to entertain the ants and grasshoppers with “news” stories about celebrities and crime instead of stories that show how dramatically the corporatocracy has stacked the deck against them.

While powerful corporate/government collusion continues to gut the ants’ middle class, the gullible, frustrated ants mistakenly blame their troubles on the powerless grasshoppers.

Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin co-host Fox News’ “Blame it on the Grasshoppers” telethon, where Ted Nugent whips the crowd into a lather with a rousing version of his new hit, “It’s so Easy Being Mean.” Bill O’Reilly helps Glenn and Sarah with back-up vocals.

In the end, we find the mega-corporation dancing and laughing the day away as the clueless ants circulate inane emails about lazy, irresponsible grasshoppers living off of hard working, sober-minded ants.